My neighbor has Vonage. Yesterday I called his phone #. On his caller ID my phone number appeared along with an incorrect name. Instead of my name, the caller ID showed "Elizabeth Lilly." Strange thing about this is that this is my mother's name, and she passed away 3 years ago. We live in Illinois, but my mother lived only in Ohio and never had phone service with Vonage. She never used my address or phone number or shared any kind of account with me. My neighbor's caller ID is the only one that registers my phone number with the Elizabeth Lilly name. Can anyone explain this? By the way, my name is not the same as my mother's, nor is Lilly my maiden name. I would appreciate some input as this has been very unsettling to me. Thanks.

You may want to check with them to see what they have on record as the "owner" of the number you are calling from.

Curious - does your caller ID info appear wrong on anyone else's phone, or just your neighbor who is using Vonage? It is possible on some phones to program a different name associated with a particular phone number. In other words, when calling my home from my cell phone, caller ID shows "Cellular Call" and then shows the phone number. I am able to reprogram my phone to show my name when it sees that number instead, now.

agreed, the only way to test the caller id info is with a phone with no phone book. If that phone has a phone book, it will display whatever name is associated with that number in your caller id. This is true with cell phones as well as home phones.

For example, if I program Joe Peters with the phone number (555) 555-1234 but the phone number actually belongs to his brother, it will still light up in my caller ID as Joe Peters since that's the way I programmed my phone to recognize the number.

_________________St. Louis, MOVonage Customer from February 2005 to May 2010ISP: CharterRouter: Linksys RT31P2 (blew up during electrical storm)

The name Elizabeth Lilly appears only on the caller id of my neighbor, not anyone else's. That name was never programmed into my telephone (land line) - as a matter of fact, my mother (Elizabeth Lilly) passed away in 2004 before my neighbor moved into his house, so he never knew her, never received a phone call from her. My phone service is with Comcast, and my mother had service with AT&T when she was living, but that account was closed in early 2004. Also, my land line phone was purchased in Dec. 2005, so my mother's name never appeared on the caller id or was programmed into the phone. I have called my neighbor's house many times, and his caller id always registered my name and phone number. This is the first time this has ever happened. I appreciate anyone's input.

jmelcer wrote "Caller ID information comes from whomever your service is being provided by"

That's actually not true of Caller ID name in the United States. In the U.S.of.A., we made the decision to send only the Caller ID number across the network. The receiving telephone company (the telephone company providing service to the CALLED party) receives only the phone number, no name. That company, if they wish to provide Caller ID name at all, must then do a database lookup to obtain the name. There are a number of different number-to-name database companies out there, each of which has different sources for the data they use.

It is quite common for these databases to contain incorrect information. The information can be absent, outdated, or simply the product of some programmer's fanciful idea of how to search for and find names and associate them with numbers.

I frequently find that Caller ID name for the same calling number displays differently on my Verizon POTS line and on my Vonage service.

I should mention that what I wrote in the previous note about "sending caller name across the network" applies to the PSTN. For Voip calls which do not go through the PSTN, the Caller ID name is sent in the SIP protocol messages. It will, of course, be lost if the call goes out into the PSTN, but for a call within Voip (such as within Vonage), what you send is what the called party will get.

Since Vonage, by default, sends nothing, a call from one Vonage customer to another will normally send nothing. However, if you have a Vonage Softphone account, you can set the Caller ID Name to be whatever you would like, and that will show up if you call another Vonage customer, or theoretically anyone that Vonage reaches directly by Voip without egress via the PSTN.